


Overload

by AikoIsari



Series: Odds and Ends (Digimon) [28]
Category: Digimon - All Media Types, Digimon Story (Video Games)
Genre: Drama, F/M, OT5, OT5 Friendship, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Spoilers, sensory issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 13:13:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6117514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AikoIsari/pseuds/AikoIsari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Cyber Sleuth] It doesn't really feel like it's over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Overload

He knows her colors by smell more than sight.

He always saw her pastel, always saw her bright primaries with his ears and nose. Eaters see colorblind, did you know? Probably not, no one remembers. No one remembers anything anymore. That's the worst part.

He sees her, a great golden light in monochrome apocalypse. He sees her by smell rather than sight. He sees her smile and wave, gloved hand rough against his smooth fingers. He smells pixels and ambrosia mixed with the rubber of a deflated basketball. She leads him, helps him walk. She laughs in his ear when she needs to make him feel better and it's never loud. Ami isn't loud. She's soft and firm in brain and body and it is beautiful and rich after the dead feeling of everything and nothing for so long.

She hardly talks, though she has always been that way. Neither does he. It worries everyone else. It worries the world.

They don't care. She prefers it this way. He wants it to change when he's ready. There's still too many thoughts and feelings, too much knowledge from the entire world. And the Eaters have ruined him for silence. They think in the same thought at the same time. He was a part of that. He was a part of something much bigger than himself.

He corrupted them. Yuugo knows it. It's all his fault. It's his own fault that he's like this.

Ami doesn't care. Ami never cares. She just smiles and singsongs her way into everyone's hearts, slipping in before anyone can drive her out.

He is too tired to feel emotion about this.

He sleeps in her lap and feels safe, despite knowing that she doesn't feel that way at all.

* * *

Ami's cheeks hurt. It's forgivable, this, because she knows it's from her smiling too much. She knows it's a bad habit. Her mother often scolds her for it, even when she can't see it. But it jad kept her friends going for so long. How can she stop now? She just needs to put herself back together and make it real.

Putting yourself back together is better in theory, she realizes early on.

Physically, there's a set of steps. She takes them one at a time. Yuugo is with her. He's not ahead. She's, physically, been comatose a much shorter time than he has.

(Him because of a terrorist attack, her because she's always been a bit brittle, and no, that's just not true at all, the Digimon, the Eaters-)

She heaves a sigh at her apartment. It's not clean enough for her mother, not clean enough to have the dream boy on her couch, but they're both here, sharing conversation over tea. She looks so happy, the happiest she's been since Ami's middle school graduation, since back when-

(Since the fire and the ruins of the factory and the funeral that she had missed because she was in another part of the country-)

Had her mother known? Had she remembered?

Well, thinking on it, she wouldn't remember now, would she?

That hurts even more. Now she can never ask.

Ami turns back to the touch of cool hands on her wrist. Yuugo, eyes as wide as they can be in their narrow sockets, like their mother, the mother who had died too (soap opera disease or childbirth or maybe a car accident, something tragic, something that builds the resentment in his heart even more because he's just not sure anymore), the siblings are not used to parents at all but they look just like them), regards her with old eyes.

"Thinking about food bills?" The joke is inside, inside the lungs and the stomach where laughter likes to be.

She laughs to prove it. "More like coffee beans."

He touches her cheek, and it's too much and perfect at the same time. "Yeah, those are terrifying, especially with bouillabaisse. "

"Apple vinegar then?"

He pokes her in the cheek. "Not to your mom."

Ami laughs louder this time and pushes the thoughts deep down to focus on the present.

Again.

* * *

The others are worried about them.

Goes without saying, of course, but Ami more because she tried to do too much too fast. School and cases and rehab and exhaustion. Yuugo tries to slow her whenever he can but no one can really. They are always flying after her trail and he has the weakest vocal chords and the weariest wings.

So when he catches up, it's when she's stopped for the day, long enough to make ramen. Not good enough in his opinion. He snatches the styrofoam and goes to her fridge.

(Her mother is already gone, of course. She's managed to rest for her birthday but little longer. The lack of a father means a lack of stability even in this day and age and Ami's never liked charity. Good deeds are different, she insists.)

"Do you eat?" he asks rhetorically.

She huffs. "of course I do. I'm just not Yuuko."

Yuugo smiles wearily. "She's always been that way." Eating like a bird and ending up like one too.

"I remember." The word 'remember' is full of so much fondness now, less neck biting and more easy nuzzling of a jaw. "Her sweet tooth is almost as disturbing as her stomach." Ami reached out and tousled his hair. "No fancy steaks anymore, you hear? Her wallet can handle it. Mine can't."

Yuugo laughed easily again, touching her arm with a stray reverie. He could touch people now, touch them and watch them not fade before his eyes, not watch fear go to stillness.

Yet his fingers still tremble.

The world rewound and wound again, spinning like strands of DNA. Everything is as it should be, with its happy ending and the worlds apart until they met again.

So why didn't it feel like it was over?

* * *

They're not happy, he realizes two months in, none of them, he and Ami least of all. So no wonder it's a mess.

They've spend too much time fighting, so much of it that when he takes her home and they kiss on the couch sometimes there's a little blood and some scratching and they don't know how to apologize.

The outside world thinks it's too fast but all of them know it's not. All of them know that if they have the chance, they'd do it twice over and with each other, but for now they simply cannot.

It's not over. Suedo had thought he had saved them but he had made it worse. He had made the feeling only grow because there was nowhere to put it. There had been no

The reset had not been their happy ending, no matter how many people had been saved from the eaters.

He spends his nights vibrating on his bed sometimes, until Yuuko crawls in like they're five years old and tells him stories of his very own Mugendramon. When he's at Ami's for the night, they sometimes wrestle and he screams into the pillow the words the Eaters had used with his mouth. He acts like he wasn't angry and scared back then but he had been. He had been so small and young like the rest of them.

But he had said to leave him behind and that had been _stupid,_ hadn't it?

He regrets it even more now, all of those lost years.

Ami hits him over the head for it, hits him a lot and kisses his face and cries into his shoulder, sometimes in the span of the same half an hour. He doesn't complain. He doesn't want her to bottle it up. But she does.

He will make her stop eventually.

* * *

Ami knows that she's not okay.

She knows it better than she lets on because it's very much there. The memories of falling apart are very real, much like his memories of being a thousand places at once and yet not there at all.

Ami tries to make Nokia dinner and laughs when there isn't enough. She watches Yuuko sip beer and then spit it out. It's probably the first time she's spat out anything edible in her life. They all laugh together because she doesn't deny it. Nor does she deny the comfort she's finding in Arata's stomach, with no Fei around to complain about it. Nokia pretends the girl's arm isn't wanted but it is. She needs to work on her tsundere.

Yuugo seems not to care either, which is the most important thing. He is resting in her lap and rubbing the feeling out of her fingers. She uses her glove to pull at stray knots and poke a button nose. He blushes. They laugh. The air is warm with their presence, with their love of each other. It's warm and quiet for the time they lack words.

In a few years they'll probably be all together still, the five of them. They don't want the boundaries anymore. They don't want the distance to exist in this place called reality. But for the moment, because they're minors, it will.

For now, they settle on being in the same room. The same just-right room, with the same just-right people. Everything has changed, but nothing has.

* * *

When they wake, it's no surprise that they're all over each other. None of them sleep peacefully. The tangle is no longer embarrassing. Instead people share unhurried embraces and throw breakfast menus at each other.

No one makes a fuss when Yuugo clings to Ami long enough to press a kiss to her temple. They _do_ fuss when the kiss turns into a snog fest against the counter. It's not because they're jealous! It's really not!

(Yuugo makes it up to them with French Toast and fruit. Ami doesn't make up for it at all.)

They're not okay, but they're together, and somehow, it makes everything seem possible.

**Author's Note:**

> Crosspost time! So I beat Cyber Sleuth in a week and the urges to ship everyone together has not faded. Even after trying to write two of them together, it still slipped in. Oops. Oh well. Hope everyone enjoys.
> 
> Challenges: Diversity Writing E48. write a story that explores the meaning of life, OTP Collection, Pairing Diversity Boot Camp prompt 46. control, Valentine's Advent day 29, Digimon Game/Manga Non-Flash Bingo 025 - genre: drama, and Headcanons Challenge


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